Fiction

You can’t afford to miss Jomo by 7am. In a school where Mrs. Nwokejiegebe was more feared than the Headmistress, you’re better off missing school for the day than turning up late. We lived in the suburbs. But if you made it to the bus stop early enough to catch Jomo, it was a one-way […]

Mummy Tobe sat in the spacious living room of her one-bedroom apartment, her jaw set firmly on her hand and her hand set firmly on her leg. Her expression was one of deep thought. Her eyes fixed on the linoleum floor and peered into the unknown. Her friend Agnes was sitting on the same sofa […]

Ayotola Tehingbola’s Lagos Will Be Hard for You, a short story collection, published in the UK by Jacaranda Books (2026) and in Nigeria by Masobe Books (2025), begins with a death that refuses to stay contained. In “abba father,” the opening story of the collection, Ibrahim Mohammed learns, by way of a curt text message, […]

When Oris Aigbokhaevbolo declared Nigerian literature dead, he did not do so casually. He was not lamenting a temporary lull or the disappearance of a few magazines. He was naming what he saw as a fundamental failure of formation. There was, in his account, no stable literary life to grow into. Writing appeared intensely, briefly, […]

Novels often build toward closure, offering readers a resolution or tying loose ends, but in Dream Count, Adichie resists this expectation. She leaves you with crescendoed emotions, emphasising her central concern: the elusive nature of dreams as mediated through memory. This, alongside the novel’s interrogation of how privilege grants and strips women of agency, forms […]

Only the dead have seen the end of war- George Santayana Book: The Road to the Country, Author: Chigozie Obioma Publisher: Masobe Books, Lagos Year: 2024 The Nigeria civil war (1967-70) has produced so many literary works that it would be a surprise if definitive course (s) on the war is not already in our […]

From 252 entries down to 11 longlisted authors, The Nigeria Prize for Literature have pruned their list down to three finalists. This year’s panel of judges is chaired by Associate Professor Saeedat Bolajoko Aliyu of the Department of English, Kwara State University. Other members of the panel include Professor Stephen Mbanefo Ogene, Professor of Comparative […]

When we last went to Mother’s rural home in Gutu in the early months of 1997, the river still flowed, the buses still ran on time, our money still had value and I still cared about my family. I still cared about her. No, not Mother. Her. No two people were closer than me and […]

Following a milestone achievement for Mauritanian literature, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews novelist and journalist Ahmed Vall Dine. His novel, Danishmand, has secured a coveted spot on the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) shortlist, making Vall Dine the first writer from Mauritania to reach this stage since the prize was inaugurated in 2007. Danishmand is […]

Foluso Agbaje’s remarkable debut, The Parlour Wife, is likely the first novel many will read that focuses on the impact of the Second World War on an African population, with African characters squarely at its centre, and by an African author. The main setting is Lagos, the coastal city that was at the heart of […]